STILL STANDING: This Great Neck house is part of teacher Alan Rosenfeld’s $6 million portfolio. (Dennis Clark)
Department of Education bureaucrats bungled the city’s best chance to rid itself of its notorious $100,000-a-year rubber-room teacher by failing to secure the testimony of a series of students who accused him of creepy behavior, documents obtained by The Post show.
Typing instructor Alan Rosenfeld has received full pay without setting foot in the classroom in more than a decade — even after six junior-high-school girls accused him of leering at them and making inappropriate remarks.
The case was botched because of the DOE’s inability to produce required documentation — such as attendance records — for four of the six student witnesses at his 2003 disciplinary hearing, records show.
“The district was directed to produce student attendance records for students who otherwise had been permitted to testify,” independent hearing officer Eric Lawson Jr. wrote in May 2003.
But without the all the necessary documents, the students couldn’t speak at Rosenfeld’s hearing.
Education officials also yanked another student witness for unspecified reasons.
As a result, all but one of the accusations Rosenfeld faced were thrown out.
“Five of the six [charges] were dismissed because of the district’s failure to timely and in a thorough manner supply student records,” Lawson wrote.
“[Rosenfeld] was neither adjudicated guilty nor was he found innocent of these five specifications since they were disposed of on procedural grounds,” Lawson added.
Rosenfeld now spends his days as a copy clerk in a DOE facility, and uses most of his time to manage his multimillion-dollar real-estate portfolio.
With just one witness cleared to back up her complaint in person — her accusation was described in the documents as relatively “innocuous” compared to the others — Lawson was limited to docking Rosenfeld just one week’s pay.
Even with that paltry penalty, city administrators refused to put Rosenfeld back in the classroom based on the findings of the city’s Special Commissioner of Investigation — whose report came before the hearing was held and recommended that Rosenfeld be terminated.
Six different girls enrolled in IS 347 in Queens and an adjoining high school made similar allegations against Rosenfeld in the spring of 2001 — just months after he became dean at the school.
One girl alleged he told her that she was “sexy” and that “she should wear a bathing suit to show her body off.”
And four other girls reported being creeped out by Rosenfeld’s ogling.
Rosenfeld, who became a city teacher in 1968, denied all the charges.
Since then, the licensed attorney and real-estate broker has sat in a Long Island City, Queens, facility with plenty of time to manage his 14 properties worth in excess of $6 million.
He could not be reached for comment. The DOE declined to comment.
Additional reporting by Yoav Gonen